


Flicker

by Wenzel



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, M/M, daemon AU, klance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-07-28 17:46:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7650526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wenzel/pseuds/Wenzel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out that the only person who can understand someone whose daemon refuses to settle is someone who doesn’t even have one.</p>
<p>Klance Daemon AU!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Lance was born surrounded by family. His mother liked to tell him that the sound of waves outside their home soothed him after his first breath, and from that first breath came a small mouse named Ysabel. “She climbed up the bed’s legs,” his mother told him when he was older, “and sniffed you like she was about to take a bite. Your dad almost thought she was an animal.”

“I wasn’t that bad,” Ysabel muttered every time. She liked to perch on his shoulder as a bird. “I’d just never _smelled_ before.” But Ysabel could be pacified by Lance scratching where she couldn’t reach, and she never meant anything by it anyway.

Lance grew up in a busy coastal town. The sun was always out, and the tourists were always buzzing around the downtown. You could pick out the tourists by their gawping and pointing. Everything was a surprise to them—whether it was the solid 10 lifeguard, the giant waves, or the kitschy little shops that lined the beach front. When he was young, Ysabel would egg him on to surf. “You suck,” she’d tell him. “But I can help, y’know!”

Her version of helping was turning into a seal and watching him struggle to balance. She laughed with the others when he fell, but when he sulked, she’d press against him as a sea otter. “You’re doing better,” she’d say. “We should get ice cream!”

He went to school in a wooded area. Half the building was small, built for younger-years whose daemons hadn’t settled. The other half was for those who’d settled: that area helped shelter daemons like horses or big cats. Those were rare, he knew, but they happened. Sometimes they even happened when the person was young. Rumours said there was a class of eleven year olds with large settled daemons in the bigger section of the school. He never saw them, though, and Ysabel showed little interest in settling.

“I’d rather be a thousand things than one,” she told him when he was ten. “That way, no matter what you do, I can keep up.” Her gold eyes watched him from a furry feline face. She was a calico half-buried in a blanket.

“I guess,” he said. “I mean, what if you turn into something uncool? It’d suck if you were a chicken or something.” When his friend’s daemon turned into a hen, he kept his thoughts to himself, though. People were already snickering enough. “She can fly, right?” he asked one day. “That’s cool.”

“She can’t,” his friend said. He slouched, his arms wrapped around his daemon. “But she’s—she’s _fine_.”

His mother tsked when he told her about it. “There’s so much pressure these days for everyone to have the flashiest daemon.” She’d plunked a plate of snacks in front of him and sat beside him on a stool. “Those teasing him will hush up when they get their own settled daemons. It’s a bigger sign of maturity these days when people stop fussing over daemon forms and get to enjoying life.”

Alonsico snuffled from the front door. “She’s right,” he said. His tail wagged. “I remember being sneered at for being small. Week later, that daemon settled as a chickadee. I didn’t say a word, mind, but you didn’t hear a peep from them after.”

“Yeah,” Lance said. “But Ysabel isn’t going to settle.”

Both Alonsico and his mother went quiet. “Honey,” his mother said, just as Alonsico spoke.

“It has to happen,” Alonsico said. “It _always_ happens. It’s part of life.” He drew himself up from the carpet. He was a shaggy grey dog with puppy brown eyes. Those eyes were directed at Ysabel who lazed on top of the fridge as a snake. “It’s going to happen, Ysabel.”

“Not if I don’t want it to,” she said. “The rest of you can decide to become one thing. But I’m going to be _everything_.” His mother’s lips thinned and she shook her head at Lance. He knew he should agree with his mother. He knew Ysabel would settle because that’s what happened in every book, every movie, every song. But when he felt Ysabel’s form roiling like the sea in his hands, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her to settle. Because why be one thing when you could be the world?


	2. Chapter 2

People started noticing when he was 14. Before that, some people called him a late bloomer. “My niece didn’t settle until she was 15,” a teacher told him when he was 12. He’d nodded, even as Ysabel snickered around his neck. “Don’t worry about it!”

He didn’t need to when his family did all the worrying for him. His mother remembered Ysabel’s promise: she sat him down several times over the years, her voice tense and calm as she told him the importance of settling. “It’s about growing up,” she said. Lance always shrugged. It wasn’t really about growing up, though. It was more about freezing. It was about becoming something that would last for the rest of his life.

He wasn’t interested in that. Life had so much more to give. When his classmates noticed—their daemons all settled into a plethora of forms—he shrugged at them too. “It’s immature,” a girl told him when he was 13. She looked down her long nose at him. “Daemons settling is a sign of becoming an adult. Who’s going to hire you if when your daemon’s still changing?”

Ysabel and Lance shared a look. “Who’s going to hire someone with a vulture daemon?” Lance asked. Her ragged almost-bare daemon stiffened from where it perched. “Really, neither of us should worry. Daemons are part of the package. You’re gonna do fine, I’m gonna do fine, and Ysabel—Ysabel’s good at everything.” Ysabel took that as a cue to change into a vulture—a bearded one smeared with red. She perched beside the girl’s daemon. Lance leaned in, smirking. “We should hang out some time—“

It’d been a 50/50 shot. He struck out that time. But it worked enough that he didn’t shelve the line. As everyone around him got older, the more the line worked. He went—at 13--- from the butt of jokes and the occasional shove to something a bit stranger. When his baby fat receded from his cheeks, people began to gawk at his changing daemon.

He’d walk through the mall with Ysabel and some friends. Nobody would notice his dog daemon, except when they got near a fountain and Ysabel changed to something new to swim around with other daemons. People would point. Some would walk up to him, demanding answers. A few others were intrigued. “How hasn’t she settled?” a man asked him once as Lance ate a hotdog and Ysabel drifted around in the fountain as a swan.

“She doesn’t want to,” Lance said.

The man blinked. He looked down at his muskrat daemon. “She didn’t want to either,” the man said. “But it happened anyway.” He gave Ysabel a wistful look. “My daemon’s lovely, you understand. But sometimes I miss having her fly after me.” His lips twitched between a smile and a frown. “You don’t let anyone knock her, yeah?”

“Never,” Lance said. It was true. But when he turned 15, everything became worse. His teachers contacted his parents. The local newspaper sent emails. His friends looked up world records. Everyone, he thought, was bemused. Except for him and Ysabel.

“The record’s nineteen” one of his friends told him at a diner. The friend fiddled with a fry as he spoke. “I think you’ll go a bit longer.” Lance almost laughed. He planned to go all the way. When he was dragged to a therapy session by the school board, he told the man the same.

“It doesn’t work like that,” the man said, not unkind, but still annoying. “It isn’t a choice. I understand being afraid of growing up—“

“It’s not about that,” Lance said. He wasn’t afraid. Maybe when he’d been younger, he would have been. The idea of Ysabel and himself freezing to something had scared him. But he wasn’t afraid: he just didn’t like the concept. Ysabel’s words— _why be one thing when you could be the world_ —followed him. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be responsible. Vaguely responsible, he amended when he told his parents that.

“You can’t go back,” his mother told him. “It’s—they’re nervous about Ysabel.” Alonso snuffled beside her. “They think she’s a bad influence.”

His father snorted, the sound harsher than Alonso’s snuffle. “It’s not any of their business.” His dark eyebrows furrowed. “Not that they’ll listen to that. I know it’s… not the best thing to do. But we can’t afford a lawyer.”

Ysabel’s warm fur pressed against his bare forearm. She looked at him with husky-blue eyes. “I don’t care,” he lied. It was the first lie about his situation that he’d said. “I wanted to go to the Garrison anyway.” That part was true. He’d worked hard on his application. He’d taken advanced courses, extracurriculars, and summer classes. He’d helped run summer camps for aspiring cadets. But what if they had a problem with Ysabel too?

That summer, he withdrew from his high school. Some people asked why. His friends were unhappy at the answer. Why don’t you fight it, some asked. Others said the administration had a point. “I just think it’s a bit… unnatural, you know?” one said. He didn’t speak to them again. Through the grapevine, he caught wind of gossip. Some people said he’d hurt his daemon to make it stay unsettled. One rumour labelled him part of a science experiment from the government.

The rumours frayed at his friendships. A few people drifted out of contact. One friendship ended when Ysabel changed to a hawk to perch on his shoulder. “It’s freakish,” the friend had hissed. “It’s—the least you could do is _pretend_.”

“It’s open season,” he told Ysabel when they were alone. “Now that school’s fucked us over, they think they can say what they want.”

“They can’t,” she said. She was a small lion. Her gold eyes were fierce. “They’re mean and stupid. They don’t matter.”

But they did, in a way. By mid-summer, he had no one other than Ysabel and his family to talk to as his application crawled through the Garrison’s system. Anyone who still wanted to hang out with him was there for the spectacle of Ysabel. Nobody asked about him. He tried to believe his mother when she told him it was just the friends being immature, that it was high school still, and gossip was king. It’ll change, she’d told him. He wondered if she was right.

In between working at a beach-side ice cream shop and staring down his application status, he took to hitting up malls. Part of him wanted to ask Ysabel to pretend to be settled. The other part balked: if people had a problem with it, that was their fault. Ysabel was perfect, he told himself, as another girl gave his daemon an uneasy look and left. It happened enough to the point he lost count.

It didn’t matter. What mattered was the status update on the Garrison’s webpage that read ACCEPTED PENDING INTERVIEW.

**Author's Note:**

> a small fic for me to do in my spare time! find me at the-wenzel.tumblr.com.


End file.
